Real-time Homecoming and A Hot Day in Piura

Jiggity Jig - April 25, 2010

I'm back in Iowa (likewise, Miriam is back in Pennsylvania). This actually happened about four days ago, but I still haven't quite gotten used to the feeling. The adventure is still warm in my senses and on my limbs. The way to describe this place and its familiar features seems to take the form of only one word, thus far: opulence.
My stomach too seems to be experiencing difficulty understanding what has happened in the last few days. Suddenly the milk is fresh again, not that stuff that will stand forever at room temperature in a box. The cupboards are brimming full with a well-stocked collection of the rare elements that drive tastebuds mad the world over. My guts aren't prepared for this access, and they're letting me know that I must take things slowly.
Anyway, among the opulent features of the life I find myself rejoining is a constant access to the internet, which should be a real boon insofar as the updating of this blog is concerned. So, without dwelling any longer on understanding and telling the concluding portions of this tale, let me continue with our trudge into the depths of Peru.

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We sat, sweating and thumbing through our respective guidebooks (Peru was the only country for which we had afforded this kind of redundancy, hauling both the Footprints 2010 and the Lonely Planet 2008). We had already bought our tickets from Piura to Lima, and were now on an endurance race to kill the many hours that lay between us and our departure time, something like 1800 hrs, in the least unpleasant way. I don't remember exactly what we were looking for in our books, and in fact the search was probably more of a general survey of Peru-bound possibilities, but I do remember at least one thing that we found.

Somewhere in Lonely Planet 2008, I think near the front of the book and perhaps in a section giving some cultural overview of the country to be toured, I ran across a passage warning travelers about a known hazardous time of year for the South America sojourner: Semana Santa. Holy week, the book informed, was a time when all forms of transportation and lodging clogged with use, and also a time when fares were jacked up from sixty to one hundred percent. Unfortunately, for erstwhile Lutherans like myself, holy week is not something that falls on a hard and fast date year after year. Rather, one can find it lurking vaguely in the range of March-April. This, as many of you know, was nearly the entire range of our trip, and a very scary unknown indeed.

We left the bus terminal, each of us carrying all of our possessions once again, and hobbled off through the streets of Piura. We had goals now, and because the sun had not yet reached its zenith we were still confident in our ability to enjoy accomplishing them.

The first problem to be addressed was a lack of food. Our maps of Piura were terrible, and we ended up at a bank first, so Miriam withdrew some Nuevo Soles. As we once again entered the flow of Piura foot traffic, we began to notice that we were still too early in the morning to hope to find food on the street that was not sold in a package. We sat down on some benches in front of a huge church and waited in the shade for half an hour. Now things were beginning to wake up, this must have been around 1000hrs. We located a little place that appeared to do some food and while I ate a jamon y queso, Miriam tried out the first ceviche of Peru, one so memorable for its quality that she would reference it throughout the remainder of our trip. It was a refreshing, albeit not (relatively) cheap desayuno: the ceviche probably cost between three and four dollars.

From 2010-02-25

From there we walked back out to the main plaza and had a look around. Miriam had noticed a tourist information office that had been closed before, adjacent the bank. That office was now open, air conditioned, and likely to know all about Peru's potential diversions and probably the precise dates of Semana Santa this year. We went in and were given what I found to be a completely hypnotic and exhaustive explication of every archaeological site in Peru by a pleasant young woman with a very methodical, rhythmic and soft tone. At one point, during something like the fifth of seven or so maps of different regions of Peru, my head slipped off of my left hand and lurched quite close to the table. After learning about more than a lifetime's worth of Peruvian attractions, we finally had the good sense to ask about the dates of holy week. Which, as it turned out, was scheduled for precisely the time when we would hurriedly revisit this expansive, international road trip on the way to a date with the Galapagos. We left, freaked out about our newfound scheduling debacle, though now equipped with an extensive collection of maps and pamphlets and two fine complimentary ballpoints.

Our next stop: LAN. We crossed the plaza again to investigate the true malleability of the terms and conditions of our South America Airpass. As I recall, we entertained a few ideas about how best to overcome the problems then coming to light in our itinerary. If we were lucky we could just rearrange things to suit this obstacle: shift each flight outright, cut out one leg, add another. If we were less lucky, we supposed, we might have to do something more drastic altogether, such as lose our second stint in Peru altogether and fly directly from Santiago back to Quito. As it turned out, neither of these options was within the range luck afforded. The details of our itinerary had become final once we made our initial flight, and any additions to the trip would fall under the insane pricing schedule that usually applies to foreigners flying under LAN. The best we could hope for was to shift the dates of one flight for a less insane fee, and hope for available buses when the time came.

As we left LAN, worried and somewhat underwhelmed by the apparent inflexibility of our trip, we soon forgot thoughts of our grandiose logistical problems in favor of thoughts such as "Why are we carrying all of our stuff right now?" or "Are we on the surface of the sun?" and, of course, "I know I'll regret saying this but, I wish we were on the damn bus already!" We dragged our under-rested bodies through the streets, almost as though we were pulling dying pack animals (ourselves) through some hellish desert, while onlookers smiled and chuckled, and made me wonder about just how stupid we looked and whether we weren't really that stupid. At that moment, we seemed to me extremely stupid, though a very nice person could probably get away with simply describing us as ridiculously unfortunate or perhaps retarded.

Not wanting to melt, and seeing few options aside from pushing on, we bought water, checked our email, and then headed for an ice cream shop. One great thing about traveling with Miriam is that ice cream has an almost cinematic ability to save the day.

From 2010-02-25

This ice cream experience was, thankfully, no exception to the physics of Miriam, and the good vibe carried us back to the stifling bus station, and all through the end of the wait and the process of boarding. And that's where the next chapter begins: on the road to Lima.

Addendum: Participant Observers in Ecuadorian Border Controls

While we got off quite easily in our dealings with the on-board customs police, the family behind us had a rather stickier encounter. Peter's previous post analyzed the behavioral gestures of those involved, but the details of what was going on add some dimension to the politics of the situation.

The first hint of trouble came when the family produced their Colombian passports.

The exchange between the police and the family, represented by the father, went, more or less, as follows:

Policeman 1 to Policeman 2 (aside): They're Colombian.

Policeman 2 to Policeman 1: Yes.

P. 1 to P. 2: They're Colombians in Ecuador traveling to Peru!

P. 2 to P. 1: Yes they are.

P. 1 to Father: We need you to get out of the bus, get all your suitcases, and be inspected.

Father to Police: No.

P. 2: What do you mean, no? We have the authority here, and you should respect our authority.

Father: No, we're not getting up. It's the middle of the night.

P. 1 (getting very angry): I am telling you, you have to be inspected!

Father: Listen, we live in Ecuador. We have friends here.

P.1: That doesn't matter right now.

Father: Well, we're not getting up.

This went on even longer, until the police simply gave up and got off the bus, and everyone tried to go back to sleep.

Unfortunately, Colombians in Ecuador are often stigmatized. There are many Colombian refugees who come across the northern border into Ecuador, to escape the violence between the government, FARC and the ELN, and the U.S. government and/or in search of the [relatively] more stable economy and work available in Ecuador (check out Ecuador en Cifras for the official census data). According to the Colombian Organizacion Internacional para las Migraciones, in 2005 there were about 80,000 legal Colombian emigrants to Ecuador. Numbers can only have gone up since then. Of course, for every one Colombian who goes through government channels to legally immigrate, there are a few coming in under the radar. Just like any other country facing an influx of immigrants, Ecuadorian citizens are unhappy about the possibility that Colombians might take their jobs, and, to make matters worse, Colombians have gained (if not necessarily earned) a reputation for being particularly violent. The family behind us got lucky--it's easy enough to imagine a situation in which such bravado in the face of a customs official would not go over so well.
And in Peru, you're guilty until proven innocent...will our heroes escape?

Further Along The Road to Piura

After getting stamped and having brief conversations at two border crossing stations on opposite sides of Peru and Ecuador in the middle of the night we sat back down and expected a calm ride to Piura, a place I estimated to be between three and four hours down the road. It was around 2:30 AM, I thought, and finally consciousness slipped away, taking all my discomfort and cares with it.

I have had, since arriving on this new continent, a seemingly unending stream of extremely vivid, cinematic, adventurous and random dreams, replete with numerous cameo appearances from grade school classmates, camp friends, family members, pets and pretty much anyone from any group with which I've ever associated, especially my closest friends. Many have been lucid, but just as many have been so convincing, intense and engaging as to remind me of the handful of landmark dreams whose memory lingers from my youth. For example, I've had no less than five flying dreams in the space of less than two months. It's been fantastic, and I hope that this trend doesn't end immediately upon my return to the states. I don't remember exactly what I was dreaming as a drifted liminally on the bus, but I do remember that as I broke through the surface of real-time light and sound of the bus ride, I was deeply engaged with some otherworldly task and extremely reticent to use my tired eyes to see, my dry throat to speak, and my wrecked neck to focus my senses.

Harsh light and the prosody of assholes, something that is suprisingly transcendent of particular languages - at least within the spectrum of latin and germanic tongues - penetrated my sleep. Miriam was the one awake this time: "We need passports again, I think" she said, and prodded me back to life. I grabbed my documents and handed them to the two uniformed "Aduanas" (customs) men now making trouble on our bus. We had stopped again, this time for a seemingly random inspection, and after explaining that we were on the way to Lima, our interrogation terminated. The two men, each with baton and gun protruding garishly from heavy nylon belts and each wearing a thick vest with neon lettering that increased their chest sizes to the proportions of crazed roosters, now moved on to the family behind us.

As regular readers of this blog will recall, this was the family with two babes in arms who had taken to the feel of my hair, and had created something dreadlock-like on the back of my head as I fought to avoid water and create conditions that would support sleep. And now, I looked back at them, and despite the unfettered curiosity of the infants, they were a really cute family, and trying their best to make a good trip out of the worst bus seats available. Something, however, seemed to be not quite up to snuff about this little group of four, as far as the border enforcers were concerned, and as the father handed them his passport, things began to get tense. Miriam, I'm sure, had a better idea of what was actually being said, and will hopefully make her own account of these events known, but from my perspective, the police quickly took a situation in which the man spoke too casually toward them and escalated it into one in which they would instruct the man, and thus everyone else in this confined space on the importance of "respect". Things got testy, necks were strained, poses struck, voices raised, baton-handles grasped, and just when it seemed like it might get ugly, the police decided that all that these precursive gestures and hints of violence were sufficient for the time being, and the encounter wrapped up with an uneasy conviviality. It was truly Cartmanesque, and they overdid it, as if to say "What? You didn't really think we were mad did you? You didn't really think we'd use all these handy implements of destruction?"

The officers sauntered out of the bus and we got on our way. Welcome to Peru.

My dream did not return so easily after this, and the air conditioner had again begun to empty its constantly condensing bowels on we window-seated travelers. I looked out into the dark at the occasional ramshackle assemblages and sometimes more expansive structures of steel and concrete, unfinished modernist projects from bygone eras and derelict initiatives for housing development. The contrast from Quito and Cuenca was stark, and, thus far, I'd still felt little resonance with the memories I carried from my time in Southern-California-like Santiago or the multi-colored hillsides of Valparaiso. In time I drifted away again into the still-dark and dusty countryside.

The fourth or fifth awakening of the day came in Piura, some two or three hours later. This time we found our bus backing through a horde of people into a strange building unlike any bus terminal I had ever experienced before. The bottom floor of an old building had been converted into a very high-ceilinged garage-like enclosure, with a weird network of cages to help keep newly-arrived passengers free from a horde of taxi and moto-taxi (the three-wheeled conversion vehicle, like a rickshaw driven by some kind of engine between a chainsaw and a moped) eager to help with transportation, money changing and probably many other useful services. It was a skillion degrees(centigrade), as we retrieved our bags from under the bus, and we were immediately latched onto by a slender man pressing hard for a chance to be our taxi driver. Multiple attempts to get a moment to think and converse about what our next move ought to be by saying, "Perhaps," "Give us a minute," and a host of other brush-offs could not shake this tenacious fellow, and eventually, after seeing that he seemed quite clean, was asking for a fair but appropriately inflated gringo price, we gave in and followed him through the mass out into the street.

We got into the cab, somewhat nervously, and I watched as our host fastened his seatbelt and made the sign of the cross, both of which seemed terribly prudent and somehow reassured me. He then drove us, maniacally through a series of back streets in which we could have been gutted and robbed twenty times over, to a weird intersection where a man he described as his friend changed 10 dollars into roughly twenty-eight nuevo soles. This was good, our driver noted, don't change too much money, don't flash a big wad around here. We soon arrived at the Cruz del Sur bus terminal, from which we hoped to catch a bus that day onward to Lima, and paid our driver about a little over two dollars with our new soles. We had made it, and he thanked us for our patronage and gave us each a folded piece of paper full of verses about Jesus. Apparently we'd lucked into a real sweetheart of a cabbie, and he wanted us to know it for sure.

Miriam and I sat down in the waiting room of Cruz del Sur. It was all of 7 AM, and our bus would not be leaving until the late afternoon. We each carried two large bags, and were not looking forward to passing this day in the heat with this sort of luggage. For a few minutes, at least, we sat and talked about what was ahead.

Until next time, all the best from Portoviejo.

Buses and Borders: Parts one and two of Infinity

The blog has once again fallen off, and just when we were about to actually go somewhere. Let me pick it back up.

So, we got out of Cuenca, narrowly missing a downpour with all our stuff. Once on the bus, Miriam went to sleep and I tried to distract myself from discomfort. It was already after dark, and this bus was worse than the one previous for several reasons. First, it was the sort of bus with seats that cut off my legs at the shins and also contained a bar that dug painfully into the lower vertebrae. Since this ride I have ridden on seemingly countless buses of this sort and have developed, if not techniques for making such rides more physically bearable, then at least a callous resilience and resignation toward this cheap, essential transportation. But at that point I was still green, still shocked and still not used to the sleeplessness that accompanies multi-day bus trips. Additionally, I was having trouble with the triad of windy road, abrupt accelleration and abrupt braking that seems to characterize the driving techniques of South American busmen. I was quite nauseous, and quickly popped one of the generic dramamine that Miriam's dad had been kind enough to give me on our last night in Philadelphia. I hoped very much to begin experiencing the only listed side effect: drowsiness. Finally, my personal discomfort and mental anguish were further complicated by the fact that our bus was the sort that is constantly stopping to pick up and drop off folks going only a short distance, preventing me from draping my legs over empty seats or sneaking them into the aisle to stretch my knees.
After several hours, our bus stopped, and the six or so bleary-eyed travelers still on board were ushered into a small waiting room. The temperature outdoors had shot up roughly thirty degrees farenheit during our descent from the altitude, the humidity was off the charts, and the waiting room was being kept at around freezing and was filled with processed dry air. We had no idea what was going on. We were still in Ecuador, but were changing buses for some reason. We managed to catch something like the last twenty minutes of a remade version of Flight of the Phoenix dubbed in Spanish. Surely an odd thing to behold. Miriam fell asleep again, and then our next bus, this time a double decker (the first one we had seen up to this point) with the characteristic arrangement of Semi-Cama top floor, and Cama/Super-Cama bottom floor arrived. Miriam and I managed to get seats together in the second to last row of the top floor, by prodding some tired-looking eastern-European looking fellows who were taking up two seats each. This bus, like the room that preceded it, was also kept at a temperature that was colder than any chilled beverage on the continent and as Miriam again became somnambulent I began to contemplate murdering the two children in sitting behind me whose mother seemed to find it cute that they enjoyed playing with my hair.
Eventually, things settled down until I started to feel large quantities of water pouring on me fromt he ceiling above my seat. The air conditioner was taking a very cold piss on my chest and stomach, and I moved my coat to direct as much of the water as possible toward the floor. Looking up the row, I took some comfort in seeing others in window seats on both sides of the aisle rousing, sputtering, failing to stop the flow of water out from their respective vents, and then pursuing similar drainage countermeasures to my own. This went on for what seemed like a long time, and then suddenly the lights came on. People began to stumble out of the bus, and I woke up Miriam.
For those who have not had the pleasure of waking a sleeping Miriam, let me tell you that it can be unpleasant in the best of circumstances, but when she has not slept sufficiently the process is like defrosting a block of ice that one knows to contain an angry giant. Upon being poked and nudged awake she glared up at me and said, greatly exhasperated, "What's going on? Why are you all wet?"

"It looks like we're going to Peru or something, and the air conditioner has been peeing on me. I think we're going to need our documents, but no one has said anything, and so I really have no clue." As it has since become clear, we were on the Ecuadorian side of the border crossing on the road to Tumbes. We stumbled out into the hot sticky night, passports in hand, looking dumbly around as people got into a couple of lines leading to a little building with men changing money all around it.

Miriam was not impressed. "What are we doing? Are we in line? Why aren't we in line?" A series of questions came from her tired, scrunchy face, without much hope for being answered. I, for my part, was now well into day two of sleeplessness, and had been uncomfortable and listless long enough to have entered a state of trancelike stupor. I was more or less completely lost, but also somehow deeply, serenely, unworried. People did this sort of thing every day, and most of the gringos we had met were much more obtuse and had much less Spanish in their heads than us, I thought to reassure myself. We hobbled along in line, received our stamps and got back on the bus, thinking perhaps that this was the end. Twenty minutes later we did it all again for the Peruvians, and again thought this was the end....

So, here in the real world (Porto Viejo, Ecuador) it's lunchtime. This will have have to continue at a later time.